Thoughts, flavors, art, and more..

That.. was a crazy semester..

I look back and see that my last post was in July 2014. I have not had any time to touch anything other than my course books and project work. I am not happy with average performance, and that is what keeps me busy all the time. My husband asks me to take it lite, but when I do it, I want to do my best!

My semester is now over, and all went well. Now I am focused on relaxing and having some fun before I begin my final and busy semester. A few interesting events happened this semester and I wanted to share them with you. Here goes:

Me and my team mates @ Virginia Tech successfully completed Phase 1 of our project – Building Energy Management Systems (BEMOSS, we call it!) funded by US Department of Energy. We competed with a couple of other universities in the US and guess what! We Won!!! When I look back, most of what I see is arguments with the team, and those numerous night outs that I put in to bring it alive. This is a very important milestone for me, in my experience. I started this project from nothing and brought it to something worth selling in front of our judges. I am thankful to all my team members for the collaboration and effort. In the end, it is success all the way.

Next most important event for this semester is my first publication in the ACM conferences. A byproduct of my course work, this project is very interesting especially for the potential it has. The project is titled ‘Shopaholic’ – which is an Android application developed to provide crowdsourced shopping assistance to the app users. It is not live in the Android market, but we soon plan to make it live.

A sad part of the whole semester was having absolutely no time to relax or have fun painting. And although I tried a better part of my semester trying to take that time, I gave up after a while, hoping to do my best in what is most important. But yea, now I am back to relaxing. And Winter is here!

I almost did not realize Summer and Fall passed without me getting a peak of it, but who cares! I did accomplish quite a few targets I set for the year. Now I am getting ready to build my website to showcase my Engineering skills as well. I hope to display it soon.

This post must be boring to you if you are reading it hoping to find some artsy detail. I will soon post my first few paintings for December 2014. These things aside, me and Shankar went on a Road Trip to places in Virginia spotted by LOVEworks (http://www.virginia.org/LOVE/). Although we were not able to cover much, it was a fantastic winter road trip with some LOVEworks conveniently located in wineries. Oh, we found one LOVEwork made of wine barrels.

Here is a collage of our LOVEworks road trip the weekend before Christmas 2014.